Priorities

Artificial Intelligence vs Welfare of children

Aneurin Bevan, the Labour politician who as Minister of Health founded the National Health Service in 1948, famously said, a year later, that “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism.” It’s a quote that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Prime Minister, repeated in a speech he gave in 2023. Starmer reminded his audience of what Bevan went on to say, that “only by the possession of power can you get the priorities correct.” Fiscal discipline, Starmer suggested, was what was needed to possess power. - aims like tackling child poverty were important, but they could only be achieved after his main mission, boosting economic growth, was achieved.

Commenting on Starmer’s speech, food poverty campaigner Jane Middleton pointed out that alleviation of child poverty was the priority to which Bevan was drawing attention in his 1949 speech. “‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’ is not now something which is said only from the pulpit,” Bevan had said. “We have woven it into the warp and weft of our national life, and we have made the claims of the children come first. What is national planning but an insistence that human beings shall make ethical choices on a national scale?” Starmer’s priorities, Middleton suggested, were the wrong way round - the priority for children should be “to find a way to fund the necessary commitments.”

Turbocharging growth

Making economic growth its main mission, yet achieving only stagnation, has not been a promising start for Starmer’s government. So it’s hardly surprising that it has heralded today’s publication of an AI Opportunities Action Plan as the path to a brighter future. Launching it, Starmer claimed that “it’s a chance to turbocharge growth” that will ensure that “Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.’

Soon after coming to power in July 2024, Starmer’s government commissioned a tech entrepreneur, Matt Clifford, to draw up this AI Action Plan. It only took six months for the plan, accompanied by 50 detailed recommendations, to be published. The government accepted all 50 recommendations on the day of publication. It aims to deliver all but 3 of them by Autumn 2026., and Matt Clfford has been drafted in to advise the Prime Minister on how to accelerate implementation.

The Action Plan certainly fulfils Starmer’s earlier promise to back “the builders not the blockers”. A key recommendation is to establish ‘AI Growth Zones’ where data centres are to be located. Planning approval for the centres, and for the additional electricity generation capacity and grid connections that they will need, is to be speeded up. Data centres are, of course, notoriously greedy in their consumption of electricity and water. Meeting the government’s target of 100% clean power by 2030 is challenging enough. How this will be affected by the additional demand from data centres is not addressed. And there’s no consideration of the likely impact on nature.

Justice for survivors of rape gangs

The UK government accepted the AI Action Plan designed by tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford in the same month as it rejected the call by survivors for a national inquiry into the rape gang scandal. Shamed by publicity generated by another tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, it agreed to 3 of the 23 recommendations that IICSA, the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse, had made in 2022. But it refused the demands for an inquiry into the specific issue of organised child sexual exploitation by local networks, which had effectively been excluded from scrutiny by the IICSA.

In the past week, more survivors have come out publicly in support of a national inquiry, and a whistleblower has revealed that a key police investigation in Rotherham was ordered “not to pursue senior officers.” Slowly but surely, senior Labour figures, and some Labour MPs, are calling on the government to support survivors’ demands and commission a national inquiry with powers to compel witnesses. Eventually, the government may calculate that its fortunes will be damaged more by continuing the cover up than by revealing the institutional corruption, including by Labour councils, that has let victims down.

If the government continues to reject survivors’ demands for a specific inquiry into rape gangs, it will be a clear indication of how little priority it gives to children who have been, and still are being, raped and tortured by organised gangs. If it does reluctantly agree to an inquiry, the contrast between the slowness and unwillingness of its response to the scandal of child sexual exploitation and the speed and eagerness of its response to a tech entrepreneur’s assessment of the opportunities of AI will also indicate the lack of priority it has given to justice for the survivors of rape gangs.

The priorities need to change.